This quarter's earnings season trend—layoffs

Layoffs and restructuring are starting to look like the trends of this earnings season.

Halliburton originally scheduled its earnings call for Monday morning, but announced on Friday that it will delay the report to May 3. This past quarter, the company paid $2.1 billion in restructuring costs, partly attributable to severance costs. Halliburton laid off 6,000 people during the quarter.

Estimize's Christine Short said that the companies reporting layoffs with earnings tend to be in sectors that are seeing major headwinds or industrywide transformation.

For example, Intel announced last week that it would cut 12,000 jobs or about 11 percent of its workforce by 2017.

"Intel's layoffs come at a time when the PC market is in a free-fall, the company is preparing for a long-term decline in that space, while making room for their cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), data centers and wearables segments," Short told CNBC in an email.

"Despite the workforce reduction announcement, this is one of the strongest semiconductor reports we have gotten this season," she added.

Last week, many other companies also announced their own restructuring plans or gave updates on the status of existing plans. Norfolk Southern also announced last week that it would be reducing operations in Knoxville, Tennessee, due to lower traffic volumes. The rail operator said its plans would impact 135 jobs.

Earlier in April, Alcoa also announced that it cut 600 jobs in the first quarter and plans to cut an additional 400 jobs this year.

Schlumberger cut 8,000 employees in the first quarter, but also converted about 5,500 contractors to employees for a net loss of roughly 2,500 jobs.

Short said that many of the other layoffs have been announced by companies that are "hurting from the decline in commodity prices, weakness in China and currency headwinds over the last 6 or so quarters." However, Short is optimistic that these companies can recover.

"I believe many of those issues will continue to dissipate, however, as the year goes on. We're already seeing the dollar stabilize, oil prices rising, and concerns around China seem to be waning," she said.

Short said that given the circumstances, she's been paying extra attention to reported revenue.

"These are companies doing what they have to do to deliver those bottom-line numbers," Short said. "Sales numbers are less easily manipulated and give a truer sense of how the company is performing."

— The Associated Press and CNBC's Anita Balakrishnan and Jacob Pramuk contributed to this report.